Software Collaboration
Wednesday, 03 February 2010 12:31
ProjectForge is the newest offering in DISA’s family of services enabling continuous collaboration among DoD software developers, testers, certifiers, operators and users. Its private project portals expand on the capabilities of SoftwareForge, which started last year and currently has some 4,000 users, in hosting public projects for software reuse and collaboration development.
"ProjectForge is the next logical step in the Forge.mil program that's surpassed all expectations," said Rob Veitmeyer, DISA's Forge.mil program manager. "It was time to address the needs of software developers looking for application lifecycle management tools but who aren't developing open source software, and ProjectForge is the perfect vehicle.”
ProjectForge got under way in late 2009 with a handful of early adopters, which included an Army project developing the IT infrastructure for MRAP vehicles and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. DISA then opened the program for wider use early in 2010.
Broader in scope yet complementary to SoftwareForge, ProjectForge is one of DISA's on-demand cloud computing services designed to reduce the time and costs that software development projects typically face in creating their own software development environment, as well as deliver enhanced capability over those available from stand alone development tools. It is a fee-for-service capability that will be delivered on-demand by DISA Computing Services and hosted in a Defense Enterprise Computing Center.
ProjectForge was needed, Vietmeyer explained in a briefing with reporters, because SoftwareForge was limited to open source-type projects. “Often, we’ve come across development projects in the department where they’re not able to participate in the fully transparent and open way. Frequently, they have information requirements or issues that require greater protection and control than is enabled in the open software forge environment. Also, we’ve run into situations where the department doesn’t have the intellectual property rights for distributing software in the open environment.” ♦
